The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn Read Free Book Online Page A

hand into the glove and move the ball up toward the webbing and down toward the heel until you find the spot where the feel is perfect. It is a matter of sensors and quite precise. Being careful not to jiggle the baseball, even a quarter-inch, you slip your hand out, wrap the leather around the ball and tie the glove tightly. Then you leave it alone. Except that in a few days you want to see how the pocket is coming so you untie the glove and toss the baseball underhand and catch it, aware of touch and listening for the sound you want, a deep clean
thwack!
Then you add more neats-foot oil, replace the ball and tie the glove again. After a while, a pocket develops that makes you seem a better fielder than you are. By that time, you have fallen in love with the glove.
    I am overwhelmed by the first baseman’s mitt and soon we are sharing a bed. Now, in the middle of the night before a train will leave Grand Central Station for Camp Al-Gon-Kwit, I have untied the glove for the penultimate time. It is 11:45 by a radium dial and I am tapping the pocket softly when Dr. Rockow coughs,turns in the other bed and calls my mother’s name.
    “Pappa? What’s the matter?”
    “Motter? Nothing is the motter. I have a little cough. But it may be contagious. You had better sleep somewhere else.”
    I bed down in another room with my sister and my glove, and in the morning Gordon takes us to Grand Central and a black and white sign that says “Al-Gon-Kwit Indians Pow-Wow Here.”
    What a summer of tragedy. With my stickball swing, I’m not much of a hardball hitter. A baseball bat weighs as much as five broomsticks. I can’t pull and I haven’t any power. My arm is weak. I would be all right at first base because I’ve mastered catching thrown balls in the hall on St. Marks Place. But throws can be short, and a hardball bounces erratically off dirt, especially the pebbly, grassless Berkshire soil of Diamond 2 at Camp Al-Gon-Kwit (not depicted in the brochure). I am the third best player in Bunk 4. I am good enough to play the first half of Al-Gon-Kwit’s game against Camp Ellis (named for the owner) and to line a single to right field. But Wally Siedman (two doubles) is a better ball player and so is Lonnie Katz, who has long, sleek, veiny muscles and cracks a home run down the left-field line. I am no idiot. I know about Hephaestus and Haydn and about Tinker and Matty and McGraw and I have even, not telling my mother so as not to give her satisfaction, read a little of
Ivanhoe.
If, in my bunk alone, Siedman and Katz are already better, will there be room for me on the
Dodgers?
And first base! In practice, I lean toward a short throw which bounces off a stone and hits the side of my head. It is a minute before double vision passes. “You’re a pretty fair ball player,” says Uncle Flit Felderman, my counselor, rubbing my head as we sit on an embankment. He is in dental college and understands first aid.
    “I’m not crying, Uncle Flit. A hit in the head just makes your eyes water.”
    “You’re all right,” Uncle Flit says. “With a little more size,you’ll start to pull. But not first base. The outfield.”
    Hasn’t Uncle Flit noticed—
I
have noticed—that I am a terrible judge of fly balls?
    “Or second.”
    I’m not crazy about hard grounders either. “Thanks, Uncle Flit,” I say. A week later in batting practice, Uncle Iz Brown throws a medium-speed pitch into my ribs. I spin in pain but keep my feet and rub dirt into my palms. “You want to play the game,
play the game,”
barks Uncle Iz. “Get in and hit, or go to the infirmary.”
    As the camp train carries us slowly down the Harlem Valley toward New York, I am coughing just often enough to remember the sensation of a baseball striking ribs. On my lap the outsized first baseman’s mitt shows the scratches and scars of a vigorous summer.
    I cannot tell my father. How can I admit to the old City College third baseman what I have grasped, that I will never be